Part Three in a three-part series; read Part One here and Part Two here.

“Every international body that deals with agriculture has come to recognise the need to prioritise food security over simply promoting trade. While the original Rome Declaration on Food Security in 1996 talked about ensuring food security through market-based mechanisms, the 2009World Summit on Food Security placed emphasis instead on national investments in agriculture. The African Union announced in the ‘Maputo Declaration’ in 2004 the commitment by each country to invest 10 percent of national budgets in agricultural production, which it reiterated (in 2014) in launching the ‘Year of Food Security’.”

This unambiguous statement by Deborah James directly contradicts South Africa’s focus on the necessity of food exports, as was covered in parts One and Two of this series. This begs the question of which policy is rational?

Contradictory positions can be equally rational

Agri-SA is dedicated to “protecting and promoting” South African agriculture. Its article “Rapid Increase of the National Minimum Wage is Throttling Agricultural Sector Growth” concludes with a repeated “call to government to prioritise food security and employment protection in the determination of the national minimum wage”.

Is this call irrational rather than rationally reflecting the needs of its members? A simple and incontrovertible definition of rational being in “accordance with the principles of logic or reason”.

What is insufficiently recognised is that most people most of the time seek to act rationally. Sharp differences nonetheless arise because people’s behaviour is usually shaped by their position in society – including its (hegemonic) value system – and the rational needs and aspirations to which it gives rise. People with similar social positions invariably link up to form groups of varying size and socioeconomic power.

How one might then ask, is rational change possible if the antagonists are both acting rationally? How, more particularly for this series, do we break the trade agreements that condemn the many to food poverty while recognising that those agreements exist because they are rationally designed to provide food for the few?

The few have economic and political power; the many have only the numbers. And numbers count in a democracy. When only 39% of eligible voters actually voted in our May election, and when that means that the party with the largest vote in that election represents only 15.7% of eligible voters, then what, besides being a sick democracy, is the lesson of our May election?

The main one, I suggest, was the failure of the side with the numbers to transfer their majority into realised votes. The absence of any credible, alternate party is the main reason for this failure.

This gives rise to a relatively easy challenge among the many others. Rather than questioning the rationality of those who promote the priority of exporting a commodity – food – paid for by the food poverty of the many, expose the double-speak they proffer as a rationale for their position.

Recall Agri-SA’s just-quoted appeal to the government. The right to continue paying farm workers poverty wages was made in the virtuous name of “food security and employment protection”. This objective contradicts their appeal to the government not to increase the national minimum wage. This makes it irrational.

To the tens of millions who know only food insecurity and unemployment, as well as many among those tens of millions who didn’t vote, I offer the following for their consideration.

How to achieve paradigm shift

An answer to this fundamental challenge – with the shift being “an important change that happens when the usual way of thinking about or doing something is replaced by a new and different way” – begins with two simple steps of recognition:

1. That the “normal” way of doing things is not “natural” and that (many) alternatives are invariably available.
2. That economists in particular have a long history of providing purportedly scientific cover for what is presented as “the only way”.
3. Well-known academic and commentator Ismail Lagardien devotes a recent Business Day article to this long history, entitled “Prominence and Prestige Tie Economists to Power and Privilege”.

He writes: “It is power that determines which ideas or beliefs are taken seriously. It is all the more concerning, though, that it has been almost impossible to affect the immovable beast that is economic orthodoxy.”

John Galbraith, the internationally renowned economist, offers a reason for this immovability. He observed that the rich are “engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness”.

Orthodox economists provide that justification. This is why they are so respected.

Besides having been an iconoclastic economist, Galbraith was unusual in being an economist with wit: “Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.” (Economics, Peace and Laughter, 1971.)

When even economists can’t find a justification for some double-speak – other than acknowledging the morality of might is right – they contrive to bury the problem, to erase it from economic history.

In this book, Oxford University professor Ha-Joon Chang details how most developed countries, which now impose “free trade” on the so-called “developing countries,” became developed by practising protectionism to defend their infant industries.

But then comes the pesky Oxford University professor, the émigré from South Korea, Ha-Joon Chang, who, among his many talents, was also an archaeological economist with his 2002 book, “Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective”.

His book details how most of the developed countries – Britain and the US in particular – who now impose “free trade” on the so-called “developing countries”, became developed by practising protectionism to defend their infant industries. Having thereby reached the top of the ladder, they then kicked it away to become the champions of free trade.

This is why “economics is a political argument”, in Chang’s pithy words (“Economics: The User’s Guide”, 2014). Like Galbraith, Chang was not inhibited about critiquing mainstream economics. Despite scientific pretences about being a science, Chang uses the much-used concept of “free markets” to expose the scientific posturing of economists: “There is really no objective way to define how free (a) market is… The free market is an illusion. If some markets look free, it is only because we so totally accept the regulations that are propping them up that they become invisible.” (“23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism”, 2010.)

Making this invisibility visible, along with demystifying economics and the “formidable nonsense” to which economists are reduced (Galbraith, “The Great Crash, 1929”, 1954) are the first steps towards paradigm shifting.

Constitution makes parliamentary endorsement of primacy of exporting food irrational 

Empathy is the source of why most people wish to think well of themselves. It’s also the origin of why “fairness” is a universal value and has been so probably since the beginning of humankind. Fairness exists even in the morality of gangsters. These features can turn the rationality of those who export food as their form of profit maximisation into an irrationality, into a contradiction between their business and the ethics they espouse.

The South African Constitution serves as an example. All the trade agreements that guarantee food insecurity for most people enjoy parliamentary approval. This was indeed the substance of both parts One and Two of this series.

All parliamentary parties have long committed themselves to addressing the triple shames of poverty, unemployment and inequality. Moreover, all members of both Houses of Parliament swear or affirm to “obey, respect and uphold” the Constitution.

Yet, many people have forgotten or never known that our Constitution begins with a Preamble proclaiming such things as:

1. “Establish(ing) a society based on… social justice and fundamental human rights.”
2. A government “based on the will of the people”.
3. “Improv(ing) the quality of life of all citizens.

The Constitution proclaims its Founding Provisions to include “human dignity, the achievement of equality and the advancement of human rights”.

The Constitution declares that its Bill Of Rights “is a cornerstone of democracy in South Africa” (S7.1) and that:

• “The state must respect, protect, promote and fulfil the rights in the Bill of Rights” (S7.2).
• “Equality includes the full and equal enjoyment of all rights and freedoms” (S9.2).
• “Everyone has inherent dignity and the right to have their dignity respected and protected” (S10).
• “Everyone has the right to… sufficient food” (S27.1.b).
• “The state must take reasonable legislative and other measures, within its available resources, to achieve the progressive realisation of these rights” (S27.2).
• “Every child has the right… to basic nutrition” (S18.1c).
• “A child’s best interests are of paramount importance in every matter concerning the child” (S28.2).
• “In this section ‘child’ means a person under the age of 18 years” (S28.3).

The exporting of food as the cornerstone of our agriculture is in breach of all the above, despite what for some is the rationality of the “market”.

Making the breach all the more contemptuous of the Constitution is that every child’s right to food is unconditional, for it is not covered by S27.2. The 2024 edition of the annual South African Child Gauge, published by the Children’s Institute at the University of Cape Town, makes sober reading, even without any mention of the Constitution and its guarantees.

A report on the latest Child Gauge, headlined “New Study Finds SA’s Little Children Are in Deep Crisis”, notes: “South Africa’s children are in deep crisis — hungry, neglected, abused, developmentally challenged.”

Having now covered the theoretical, constitutional and moral parts of how to bring about a food security paradigm shift in favour of most South Africans, we come to the final part of my answer.

The reform road to reducing food poverty

Eliminating food poverty will, alas, take more than reform, in the opinion of many, including me. However, reform is a beginning, not least because it speaks directly to the food insecure, as well as the anticipated millions who hunger for a viable alternative to the world as it is.

The needed reforms are radically different from those the Government of National Unity (GNU) is most vocal in calling for. The GNU wants more free markets, privatisation, investment, public-private partnerships and BEE.

In a word, reform for it means more neoliberalism. A radical rejection of neoliberalism does not necessarily mean a revolutionary rejection of capitalism. (See my three-part series on neoliberalism recently published by the Daily Maverick – here, here, and here).

My admired economist, Ha-Joon Chang, for instance, is not alone in combining his ruthless critique of neoliberalism with his acceptance of capitalism (“23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism”, 2010).

But there is a difference between radical reform and reformism. Reformism addresses symptoms, not causes, while radical reform confronts causes.

Whether or not these radical reforms are plastic surgery depends on one’s understanding of capitalism. This isn’t to dismiss reformists, many of whom do important work; rather it is to make explicit the inherently substantial limitation of what they do.

SA Harvest, for instance, seeks to turn the mountain of edible food that is annually wasted into 30 billion meals. The Hunger Project is another example, despite it seeing “investor participation” as a “vital ingredient” to its “recipe for resilience”. And then, there’s the longstanding international organisation committed to the oxymoron of “Fair Trade”.

Transforming ‘free trade’ into first feeding South Africans 

“Let’s be clear,” writes the founder and chief executive of SA Harvest, Alan Browde, in his article “Twenty Million South Africans Face Hunger Every Day”, “the hunger crisis in South Africa is catastrophic. You might think this is an exaggeration, but the data speaks for itself.”

Alas, the “exaggeration” is sufficiently exact to evoke memories of another of the notorious “Great Hungers” co-existing with the export of food, as the Irish potato famine of 1845-1850 is known. Mercifully, the scale of ours is no match for the Irish one, as Drew Forest details in his “Death trail of market zealots” (a must read in my opinion).

Out of an Irish population of 8.5 million in 1845, one million died and a further one million emigrated. Nor have our “market” economists sought to make our food catastrophe rational, like other economists who attributed the Irish famine to God’s infinite wisdom, which includes the wisdom of the British government not interfering with the imperatives of the “free market”, while using that wisdom to continue exporting large amounts of Irish food during the Great Hunger.

It’s a “wisdom” our government still needs to dismiss. It should come to see – or, more accurately, be made to see – that “we, the people” enshrined in our Constitution, and “we” the children to whom our Constitution guarantees food must be our government’s first priority.

Doing this sounds simple enough. It’s the metamorphosis of our government from being the protector and expensive salespeople of agri-businesses’ “surpluses” into the butterflies of food for all.

Some selected agri-business farms would be retained. What would change is their market, with a switch from prioritising the export market to the home market. Complementing this reversal to the home market and the food security it offers to everyone would eventually be labour-intensive, relatively small, agroecological farming, which includes addressing the already-being-experienced climate change threat to agriculture. Agroecological farming additionally offers the prospect of large-scale job creation.

How to face the final hurdle before the food paradigm shifts

The first requirement of the paradigm shift is recognising the formidable, united front guarding the status quo to ensure nothing changes. This united front begins with the government, Parliament, commercial agriculture and the other beneficiaries of the food export business.

Manufacturers of food for the local market, along with supermarkets, are important members of this vested interest group (See David Sanders, The Struggle for Health, 2nd edition, 2023) for they welcome their market freedom given by the (relative) absence of regulations.

Exporters to South Africa welcome the fact that a mere 2% of the tariff codes attracting a duty have been reviewed in the past five years, or that 93% of R86-billion in customs duties paid from July 2023 to June 2024 have not been reviewed in more than 20 years.

This “permanent protection” of South Africa’s international trade is no mere oversight. Daily Maverick’s Georgina Crouth, the source of the tariff code and custom duties information, quotes a former trade and industry commissioner, Meluleki Nzimande, as saying that when the government takes decisions on these matters, foreign relations figure highly.

“There’s much the government could do,” concludes SA Harvest’s Alan Browde. Despite its fundamental reformism, Browde attributes the government’s failure to make the required “fundamental systemic changes” not to the rationality of its own policy rooted in treating food as a profit-maximising commodity, but rather as a failure of the government’s political will.

Rather than being a failure of political will, the opposite is more apposite: it’s the determination of the government’s political will, not its failure, that forces people to choose between buying food or electricity. That choice is forced on them by a government, acting on behalf of a complex of agribusiness interests, which freely chooses to prioritise the food-exporting business.

And the economists can hardly be forgotten. We’ve already covered them, but the two most recent examples merit mention.

The first, a Business Day article headlined “Economists Warn on Above-Inflation Pay Raises”, expresses concern about pay increases that “relegate many people to below the breadline”.

Price increases are, by implication, a necessity of the economic law that “the employer has to recoup the losses somewhere”! The often-cited economic expert, Dawie Roodt, blames the ungrateful workers already privileged by being employed, who, because they “organise themselves to protect their jobs”, make “it difficult for the unemployed to enter the job market”.

The governor of the South African Reserve Bank is the second economist to warn against inflation just because of the recent slowing of the inflation rate. If economists were not (mostly) the hired guns of the rich, proper job creation would be their priority rather than the arbitrary inflation targets they’ve set for a compliant Reserve Bank.

An alternative to this United Front of the Privileged is a United Front of those forced in multitudinous ways to pay for the austerity imposed on them by the government and its economists, who, by protecting themselves from the consequences of their austerity policies, remain loyally wedded to neoliberalism.

People with any sense of justice for the majority and the various political groupings already challenging neoliberalism’s austerity would be part of this United Front. One such group is the Anti-Austerity Campaign with its slogan of “Give us our Daily Bread”.

Only a mass movement will provide the tipping point for the needed paradigm shift. The challenge is to make as many people as possible aware that daily bread is unavailable only because of a government and its economic advisers who see agriculture’s main purpose as being the production of a supposed surplus for export.

These same economists maintain that agricultural exports help provide the essential need for foreign exchange. This is an issue for another time. For now, it must be noted that foreign exchange is subject to the minimal regulations of neoliberalism rather than being part of a compressive industrial strategy.

Integral to the reform campaign is that, like food, electricity is seen as a commodity subject to the neoliberal canon of full cost recovery by Eskom, along with a similar neoliberal holy writ that turns citizens into customers expected to pay whatever the market rate may be for human essentials.

Free basic electricity has nothing to do with people’s actual electricity needs, even for those ever-diminishing numbers who manage to register themselves as “indigent”. It exists only as a needed moral illusion – an ideological cover for the ANC and those who are genuinely uncomfortable with South Africa’s in-your-face inequality – that the needs of the poor are reassuringly being met.

Very few South Africans know about trade. Yet they know about their hunger poverty. And they can see the food they can’t afford on display in the supermarkets and other food shops.

This is to say they know without knowing the role trade agreements play in South Africa’s world-beating inequality. They experience — without knowing it — the reality of trade being the continuation of the diplomatic politics of war by other means.

Inspired by Martin Luther King, with his “audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture of their minds, and dignity, equality, and freedom for their spirits”, the challenge — for those who agree with the analysis offered in this article — is to make the possibility of another world known to the millions who know only their food poverty.

Dreams need not be the only place to find the food security guaranteed by our Constitution and to which the UN is supposedly committed.

Jeff Rudin works at the Alternative Information and Development Centre and is a member of the Amandla! Collective. This article is published jointly with the Daily Maverick.